UPCOMING EVENTS

Dropbox has announced plans to make its platform more extensible, enabling you to work with myriad third-party applications and tools directly from within the cloud-storage service.

With Dropbox Extensions, the San Francisco-based company has partnered with a range of others, including Adobe, Nitro, Vimeo, HelloFax, DocuSign, AirSlate, HelloSign, Pixlr, and SmallPDF, to enable Dropbox users to carry out more productivity-focused tasks without leaving Dropbox.

For example, integrations with DocuSign, Adobe Sign, and HelloSign mean that you can share PDF or Word documents externally from within Dropbox and request an eSignature, with the final signed file automatically saved back into your Dropbox account.

Above: Adobe Sign in Dropbox

Additionally, with Nitro, SmallPDF, and AirSlate on board, Dropbox users can synchronize and edit PDF documents from within Dropbox, and they can use HelloFax to send an electronic fax from Word or PDF documents.

So by combining extensions, users can effectively edit a contract from start to finish, request a signature, and digitally fax the signed contract — without ever leaving Dropbox.

Elsewhere, cloud-based image-editing platform Pixlr will now let you touch up your photos while in Dropbox, Autodesk will let you view and edit .DWG files, and Vimeo will let you invite collaborators to review and annotate video-based projects.

Wooing business

Dropbox in its original guise was more of a consumer-focused product, but over the years it has doubled down on the enterprise as it seeks to monetize through subscriptions.

“We want to empower people to choose the best tools for their work by removing the friction between them,” said Dropbox SVP of engineering, product, and design Quentin Clark. “So we’re making it seamless for users to connect with partners that offer the right tools for the task at hand.”

The inaugural set of Dropbox Extensions will be available to everyone — including those on the free consumer plan — from November 27, and the company added that it expects to grow the third-party integrations into other services in the future.